Holiday Blogging

Hey! Heeeeeey! HEY! Are you still there? Or have you migrated for the holidays also? My student feed has died off in the last few days, everybody is breathing a sigh of relief. No more blogging until next semester now, right? Wrong.

Why? Well why not?

Why not keep blogging over the break? Why not see what connections we can make between real life and what we’re learning in this degree? Why not keep up with the creative practices we’ve learnt this semester?

One creative practice I want to keep up over the holidays is that of the sketch tasks. I really enjoyed creating the sketch videos for Integrated Media 1 and I wanted to keep doing them through the semester and instead got bogged down with course work and I didn’t make time to fit in any kind of sketch work. Now that I’ve got a bit more time up my sleeve, I want to start making sketch videos again.

So I’m going to take a bit of inspiration from IM1 and a bit of inspiration from Fat Mum Slim who runs a very popular photo-a-day challenge through her blog and across different social media platforms (more here).

However, I think a video a day over the holidays is a bit too much, so I’m going to run with a different format of three videos a week. You can shoot and upload them whenever you want, all in one go or spread out across the week. I’m going to be uploading mine to Vimeo and cross-posting to Twitter and my blog. You can join in by uploading to Vimeo, Vine or Youtube and posting on Twitter with the hashtag #SketchTask. I’ll be doing a round-up post on here at the end of every week with some of the videos that I really liked, so make sure to tag your sketch tasks so that I don’t miss them!

So the aim of this game is to take the prompt and use it to create a video. You can be as literal or metaphorical as you like, but I’m going to highly encourage creative thinking outside the box. For example, instead of filming something to represent “odour” in week one, why not try and film like odour? How would odour see things? Another thing that’s highly encouraged is pushing yourself and your boundaries. If you’ve never tried a particular technique or method before, use these sketch videos to give it a go! Then, reflect on how it went.

Here are the prompts for the next few weeks over the holidays:

Week 1: 10-16 June

1. Odour
2. Purple
3. A tiny detail

Week 2: 17-23 June

1. Light
2. Hands
3. Something beginning with Q

Week 3: 24-30 June

1. Poetry
2. In the middle
3. The sky

Week 4: 1-7 July

1. Evening
2. Still life
3. Loud

Week 5: 8-14 July

1. Mail
2. Man made
3. Freedom

Week 6: 15-21 July

1. Looking back
2. The big picture
3. Nothingness

Semester two starts on Monday 22 July and if this challenge gets enough of a response and you guys want to continue through the semester, I’ll pop a new list up for those weeks too.

Six weeks of filming more sketch tasks to keep my creative muscles strong… will you join me?